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Assimilation and Empire - Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541-1954 (Hardcover)
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Assimilation and Empire - Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541-1954 (Hardcover)
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Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and
colonisation, an ideology which legitimised colonisation for
centuries. Assimilation and Empire shows that the aspiration for
assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons, but was
also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation was found in
the combination of two powerful ideas: the European philosophical
conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern
state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and
cultural forms they valued and wanted to realise in their own
societies, but which did not yet exist. Saliha Belmessous examines
three imperial experiments - seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth
and twentieth-century French Algeria - and reveals the complex
inter-relationship between policies of assimilation, which were
driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the
greatest challenge to those policies, discourses of race, which
were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonised nor
European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals
given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between
assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the
sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection -
articulated through the progressive theory of history - been placed
seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through
empire, for both colonised and coloniser, reveals the futility of
the historical pursuit of perfection.
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